Wayfaring
by Ormspryde
Summary: Ten years into the future, and Danny and Vlad are still fighting. But this time, things get out of control, and set into motion a chain of events that lead to a journey into exotic locales. Rated for violence and gore. Slash in future chapters. AU because I'm ignoring Season 3. More a series of blurblets at this point than anything else.
1. Confrontation

A/N: Set ten years into the future. Season 3 never happened. I've been wanting to write this story for a long time now, I just lacked the proper beginning.

A single instant, frozen.

Daniel, eyes wide in shock, floated a hundred feet in the air. His hands still glowed from the force of the blast he'd unleashed. He hadn't mean to strike so hard - he'd thought that he and Vlad, enemies for so long - had finally begun approaching something like peace. But when the other man had delivered his shocking ultimatum - join him, or Daniel's family would die - well...

He'd lost it. Completely and utterly, like he'd sworn so many years ago when confronted with his own darkness that he would not.

A hundred feet below, Vladimir lay in a still-growing crater, forced into human form by the blast. His eyes, too, were wide, though with a combination of shock, fear, pain, and some terrible, unnameable emotion.

In the silence which followed the impact, Daniel could only stare at the bloody piece of steel rebar that protruded from his enemy's chest.

Slowly, with the dust settling back to the earth around him, Daniel landed, though he dared not transform.

'I didn't mean to,' he whispered faintly, dropping to his knees.

'...'m sorry...' Vladimir rasped. 'Never...never meant to...never hurt...the son, not the mother - Daniel, I...' Through his almost inaudible ramblings, the older man groped blindly for the younger...but at last he fell limp, terribly still.

In the haze of panic, the young man did the first thing that came to mind; he tried to find a pulse, both in Vlad's wrist and in his throat.

Nothing.

He laid an ear to the man's chest - still nothing.

Daniel sat up. What would happen to him now? No matter how much Vlad pissed him off, he hadn't meant to _kill_...and it was only now, as he stared at the older man's battered body, that he realised that the demand had been delivered, not with anger, but with _desperation_.

Without knowing exactly why, he touched the other man's face - and nearly jumped into the clouds when Vlad grabbed his hand.

'Please...help me,' the man whispered, his eyes wild, unfocused, staring.

Daniel bit his lip. He stood.


	2. Saving Your Life?

He'd never been so glad to have his own apartment as he was right now.

Somehow, he'd managed to get Vlad back here - it had to be here, Wisconsin was too far away, and...well, there was no point in taking him to a doctor when he had no pulse. The hardest part had been getting him off the rebar he'd been impaled on without attracting too much attention; finally, Danny'd used his head and turned them both intangible.

No, the hardest part had been coping with Vlad's sudden silences, worrying whether the man was really dead this time, and dealing with his sudden surges back into life.

He barely had time to wonder if he was doing the right thing.


	3. Living in the Past

_'Vladimir Volkhryvich,' the voice whispered in his head, echoing eerily as though spoken through a tunnel. 'Grandson of the sorceror.' Everything was so frosty grey around him._

_He was terribly confused, the old madness rising in his throat. Something he'd run from, all those years ago._

_He was terribly cold, too. With all the concentration he could muster, he examined his surroundings; but his conscious mind slipped away from it. Vladimir wanted to go down into the dark well; to at last be free, but something kept him at the lip. Somehow, the old witch came to mind, and then slipped away into the fog..._

_He was standing in the motherland._


	4. Discovery

Vladimir gasped himself to consciousness, his mind still shrouded with a few shreds of fog. What had happened...?

He remembered, and was ashamed of himself.

The man swallowed hard and opened his eyes. His surroundings were unfamiliar - but he spotted Daniel, and realised he had bigger issues to concern himself with.

'Um, so, you're awake,' the younger man said, rather lamely. He wouldn't look at Vladimir directly, for whatever reason.

'I...' Vladimir started to reply, only to be interrupted by a coughing fit that doubled him over. Blind with pain, he didn't see or hear the other half-ghost come up beside him.

'Vlad!'

Some time later, the coughing died down. He blinked to clear his vision, only to look down at his hands to see that they were covered in blood. Stupidly, he stared at them, then the boy. 'What's going on...?'

Daniel swallowed, hard. 'After our...fight, you...you stopped breathing, and your heart wasn't beating. I...had to bring you back here, you've been out for a couple of days...' He trailed off uncertainly.

Vladimir stared at his hands again. His heart had stopped? That was impossible, he was still alive...wasn't he? He was never sure, these days, never sure of anything and _the fog swirled around him and threatened to engulf him once again_ but he beat it back with a desperate effort. Unsure, he raised one still-bloody hand and tried to find a pulse in his wrist - when that failed, he tried the other, and then his throat. 'Oh...' he whispered.

He closed his eyes, and buried his face in his hands.


End file.
